“I would like — ” The words came out like an upwelling of nausea. “I want to ask for Adjustment.”
Jacoby looked down and shook his head. Damon sat still.
“If I were Adjusted I could get out of here,” the prisoner said. “Eventually do something. It’s my own request. A prisoner always has the option to have that, doesn’t he?”
“Your side uses that on prisoners,” Damon said. “We don’t.”
“I ask for it You have me locked up like a criminal. If I’d killed someone, wouldn’t I have a right to it? If I’d stolen or — ”
“I think you ought to have some psychiatric testing if you keep insisting on it.”
“Don’t they test — when they process for Adjustment?”
Damon looked at Jacoby.
“He’s been increasingly depressed,” Jacoby said. “He’s asked me over and over to lodge that request with station, and I haven’t.”
“We’ve never mandated Adjustment for a man who wasn’t convicted of a crime.”
“Have you ever,” the prisoner asked, “had a man in here who wasn’t?”
“Union uses it,” the supervisor said in a low voice, “without blinking. Those cells are small, Mr. Konstantin.”
“A man doesn’t ask for a thing like that,” Damon said.
“I ask,” Talley insisted. “I ask you. I want out of here.”
“It would solve the problem,” Jacoby said.
“I want to know why he wants it”
“I want out!”
Damon froze. Talley caught his breath, leaning against the table, and recovered his composure a little short of tears. Adjustment was not a punitive procedure, was never intended to be. It had double benefits… altered behavior for the violent and a little wiping of the slate for the troubled. It was the latter, he suspected, meeting Talley’s shadowed eyes. Suddenly he felt an overwelling pity for the man, who was sane, who seemed very, very sane. The station was in crisis. Events crowded in on them in which individuals could become lost, shoved aside. Cells in detention were urgently needed for real criminals, out of Q, which they had in abundance. There were worse fates than Adjustment. Being locked in a viewless eight-by-ten room for life was one.
“Pull the commitment papers out of comp,” he told the supervisor, and the supervisor passed the order via com. Jacoby fretted visibly, shuffling papers and not looking at any of them. “What I’m going to do,” Damon said to Talley, feeling as if it were some shared bad dream, “is put the papers in your hands. And you can study all the printout of explanation that goes with them. If that’s still what you want tomorrow, we’ll accept them signed. I want you also to write us a release and request in your own words, stating that this was your idea and your choice, that you’re not claustrophobic or suffering from any other disability — ”
“I was an armscomper,” Talley interjected scornfully. It was not the largest station on a ship.
“ — or condition which would cause you unusual duress. Don’t you have kin, relatives, someone who would try to talk you out of this if they heard about it?”
The eyes reacted to that, ever so slightly.
“Do you have someone?” Damon asked, hoping he had found a handhold, some reason to apply against this, “Who?”
“Dead,” Talley said.
“If this request is in reaction to that — ”
“A long time ago,” Talley said, cutting that off. Nothing more.
An angel’s face. Humanity without flaw. Birth labs? The thought came to him unbidden. It had always been abhorrent to him, Union’s engineered soldiers. His own possible prejudice worried at him. “I haven’t read your file in full,” he admitted. “This has been handled at other levels. They thought they had this settled. It bounced back to me. You had family, Mr. Talley?”
“Yes,” Talley said faintly, defiantly, making him ashamed of himself.
“Born where?”
“Cyteen.” The same small, flat voice, “I’ve given you all that. I had parents. I was born, Mr. Konstantin. Is that really pertinent?”
“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I want you to understand this: it’s not final. You can change your mind, right up to the moment the treatment begins. All you have to say is stop, I don’t want this. But after it goes so far, you’re not competent. You understand… you’re no longer able. You’ve seen Adjusted men?”
“They recover.”
“They do recover. I’ll follow the case, Mr. Talley… Lt Talley… so much as I can. You see to it,” he said to the supervisor, “that any time he sends a message, at any stage of the process, it gets to me on an emergency basis, day or night You see that the attendants understand that too, down to the orderlies. I don’t think he’ll abuse the privilege.” He looked at Jacoby. “Are you satisfied about your client?”
“It’s his right to do what he’s doing. I’m not pleased with it. But I’ll witness it. I’ll agree it solves things… maybe for the best.”
The comp printout arrived. Damon handed the papers to Jacoby for scrutiny. Jacoby marked the lines for signature and passed the folder to Talley. Talley folded it to him like something precious.
“Mr. Talley,” Damon said, rising, and on impulse offered his hand, against all the distaste he felt The young armscomper rose and took it, and the look of gratitude in his suddenly brimming eyes cancelled all certainties. “Is it possible,” Damon asked, “is it remotely possible that you have information you want wiped? That that’s why you’re doing this? I warn you it’s more likely to come out in the process than not. And we’re not interested in it, do you understand that? We have no military interests.”
That was not it. He much doubted that it could be. This was no high officer, no one like himself, who knew comp signals, access codes, the sort of thing an enemy must not have. No one had discovered the like in this man… nothing of value, not here, not at Russell’s.
“No,” Talley said. “I don’t know anything.”
Damon hesitated, still nagged by conscience, the feeling that Talley’s counsel, if no one else, ought to be protesting, doing something more vigorous, using all the delays of the law on Talley’s behalf. But that got him prison; got him… no hope. They were bringing Q outlaws into detention, far more dangerous; men who might know him, if Talley was right. Adjustment saved him, got him out of there; gave him the chance for a job, for freedom, a life. There was no one sane who would carry out revenge on someone after a mind-wipe. And the process was humane. It was always meant to be.
“Talley… have you complaint against Mallory or the personnel of Norway?”
“No.”
“Your counsel is present. It would be put on record… if you wanted to make such a complaint.”
“No.”
So that trick would not work. No delaying it for investigation. Damon nodded, walked out of the room, feeling unclean. It was a manner of murder he was doing, an assistance in suicide. They had an abundance of those too, over in Q.
iii
Kressich winced at the crash of something down the hall, beyond the sealed door, tried not to show his terror. Something was burning, smoke reaching them through the ventilation system. That more frightened him, and the half hundred gathered with him in this section of hallway. Out on the docks the police and the rioters still fired at each other. The violence was subsiding. The few with him, the remainder of Russell’s own security police, a handful of elite stationers and a scattering of young people and old… they had held the hallway against the gangs.
“We’re afire,” someone muttered, on the edge of hysteria.